The Critics Versus Shakspere

The Critics Versus Shakspere
A Brief for the Defendant

By

0
(0 Reviews)
The Critics Versus Shakspere by Francis Asbury Smith

Published:

1907

Downloads:

381

Share This

The Critics Versus Shakspere
A Brief for the Defendant

By

0
(0 Reviews)

Book Excerpt

he position of Professor Wendell can be most fairly stated in his own words. After a hasty review of the early drama, he says of Shakspere:--

"The better one knows his surroundings, the more clearly one begins to perceive that his chief peculiarity, when compared with his contemporaries, was a somewhat sluggish avoidance of needless invention. When anyone else had done a popular thing, Shakspere was pretty sure to imitate him and do it better. But he hardly ever did anything first. To his contemporaries he must have seemed deficient in originality, at least as compared with Lilly, or Marlowe, or Ben Jonson, or Beaumont and Fletcher. He was the most obviously imitative dramatist of all, following rather than leading superficial fashion."

Professor Wendell proceeds to give what he is pleased to call examples of Shakspere's "lack of superficial originality," whatever that may mean, and assumes that he "had certainly done years of work as a dramatic hack-writer" before the appearance of "Venus and A

FREE EBOOKS AND DEALS

(view all)
Glen Dawson - A Satirical Wake-up Call
FEATURED AUTHOR - After graduating from Duke University, Glen Dawson owned and operated a flexible packaging manufacturing plant for 23 years. Then, he sold the factory and went back to school to get his Master's degree in biostatistics from Boston University. When he moved to North Carolina, he opened an after-school learning academy for advanced math students in grades 2 through 12. After growing the academy from 30 to 430 students, he sold it to Art of Problem Solving. Since retiring from Art of Problem… Read more